Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Now that Fedora 7 has been released, Fedora project leader Max Spevack has a little bit of breathing room. Like nature, LWN abhors a vacuum, so we sent Max a list of questions and a request for answers. We are now happy to present the answers.

The agency turns to NetBeans, other open-source tools to project the water supply.

"OpenBSD is free as in air," Theo de Raadt [interview] stated in a recent thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. The discussion began with a note that the Open Sound System [story] had recently been "open sourced" under the GPLv2 and CDDL leading Theo to comment, "noone cares about being Open and Free anymore. They just care about being called Open and Free, and how convenient -- a bunch of laywers generated an organization that will label then Open and Free when they are not in fact so."

Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1 hit the http://ftp.slackware.com server at 16:39:01 CDT on June 14th, 2007.

The openSUSE development team this week released alpha 5 of the upcoming OpenSUSE 10.3, featuring a cutting-edge 2.6.22.rc4 kernel and a choice between GNOME or KDE desktops. The final stable edition of v10.3 is expected to be available for general release in October, the team said.

SysMaster used embedded Linux to create a four-line IP (Internet protocol) video phone with built-in PBX and audio/video playback capabilities. The Tornado M30 can help network operators deliver voice or audio/video services to consumers and business users, according to the company.

Internet phone service provider SIPphone, whose Gizmo Project software enables Linux, Windows, and Mac users to make free phone calls using their PCs, announced this week that it has added support for the AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger networks.

I'm a big fan of Richard Stallman and his work even though, the first time I interviewed him, he proceeded to criticise my questions before answering them, not a journalistic experience I'd had before. Without his vision and sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of indifference and outright hostility, we would not have the vast array of free software we enjoy today.

Ten years ago, when Metadot founder and CEO Daniel Guermeur was working for a large technology company, he discovered that the Web-based content management systems he was developing were too complicated for his customers, who kept saying they needed a Web-based portal application that was easy to learn and easy to use. Guermeur wanted to provide that, but he was stymied by the closed aspect of the technologies he was developing with: with no access to the source code and long waits for product upgrades from vendors, it would be too slow and expensive to roll out more efficient solutions. So Guermeur started looking at open source.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM), fundamental to an array of Linux distributions and the Linux Standard Base specification, has been on uncertain ground as a project in recent years. The versions of the utility shipped by the various RPM-based distros have slowly branched off in different directions, leading in some cases to stagnation. Longtime RPM maintainer Jeff Johnson took a big step this month toward revitalizing the application by relaunching rpm5.org, a site dedicated to reassembling the divergent RPM developer community and putting together a unified plan for future development.

A lengthy debate that began with a suggestion to dual license the Linux kernel under the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 [story] continues on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Throughout the ongoing thread Linux creator Linus Torvalds has spoken out on the GPLv2, the upcoming GPLv3, the BSD license, Tivo, the Free Software Foundation, and much more. During the discussion, he was asked we he chose the GPLv2 over the BSD license when he's obviously not a big fan of the FSF.

All modern operating systems are able to run many programs at the same time. For example, a typical Linux server might include a Web server, an email server, and probably a database service. Each of these programs runs as a separate process. What do you do if one of your services stops working? Here are some handy command-line tools for managing processes.

The Baylor College Human Neuroimaging Lab (HNL) uses Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record and research brain activity. The fMRI scans human brains at work, detecting areas of greater blood flow that indicate which part of the brain is active as subjects perform a variety of activities. The data flows from the scanners to a high-performance 32-node CentOS cluster to be analyzed and returned to researchers in statistical form. HNL Systems Administrator Justin King is a big fan of open source software and frequently writes his own applications when he can't find what he needs in the community. King also takes advantage of commercial open source projects.

Going head to head with Microsoft 2007, the latest version of the free-for-all OpenOffice.org touts across-the-board improvements in the software's word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation applications.

What Kodak's camera breakthrough means to you, behind Microsoft's Linux love affair, and the "greening" of the friendly skies.

Intuit said it is making this move in response to users' requests for an open-source option.

Comprehensive Upgrade Improves Performance and Extends Usability for Leading Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Exchange

In the lead-up to KDE 4, Amarok will be undergoing a number of large changes both under the hood, and cosmetically with the user interface. I managed to interview a developer, Jeff Mitchell, to talk about the things changing in Amarok from the 1.4 stable branch to version 2.0, including the playlist redesign, the context view and the new web services framework.

We see the headlines all the time: "Company X Loses 30,000,000 Customer Social Security Numbers and Other Intimately Personal and Financial Data! Haha, Boy Are Our Faces Red!" And it always turns out to be some "contractor" (notice how it's never an employee) who had the entire wad on a laptop with (seemingly) a terabyte hard drive, which was then lost or stolen, but nobody is quite sure where or when.

The deadline for the biggest ever synchronised release of open software is looming. On 29 June, the long-awaited Europarelease from the Eclipse Foundation will see updates in 20 categories of Eclipse open software. The unprecedented release covers around 30 separate components - with several making their public début.